


We're all stories in the end.

by Craftnarok



Category: Black Sails
Genre: M/M, Storytelling, and something about the value of truth, untrue backstories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-28
Updated: 2016-04-28
Packaged: 2018-06-05 01:34:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6684037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Craftnarok/pseuds/Craftnarok
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Silver likes to make up stories, and Flint likes to hear them, but they have different opinions on the importance of truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We're all stories in the end.

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [mapped](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapped/pseuds/mapped) in the [pirate_prompts_2016](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/pirate_prompts_2016) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> So the amazing shirogiku and I were talking and she has run out of prompts but we decided that we need this: 5 times Silver told Flint a backstory that wasn't true and 1 time it might actually have been true but we'll never know.
> 
> I quote Shiro:
> 
> "it'd be funny if silver told him a diff backstory each time and flint came out of it buying it for a sec and then like... wait, no!
> 
> then the same shit repeats"
> 
> No need to be a romantic relationship if you don't want to write it that way. :D
> 
> \----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> So this ended up a little more vague in terms of which stories might be based on truth and which are probably total fabrications, and they're not all technically backstories, but I kind of like it that way. Also, I was initially aiming for funny, but as usual bits and pieces of deeper feelings crept in. I hope this is close enough to what you were hoping for with the prompt to satisfy!

“Did it say something to offend you?”

Flint looked up confused, stirred from his thoughts. “Pardon?” he said. Silver was standing on the other side of his desk looking amused, having entered Flint’s cabin unacknowledged.

“Your belt. You were scowling at it as though it had dared to question your mother’s virtue,” Silver said, mischief in his eyes.

Flint turned his scowl on Silver, but it only seemed to amuse him further. He laid the belt which was in his hands flat across his desk and leant back in his chair. “It’s stained,” he said. “Blood, I think. And the saltwater and the sun have bleached and dried it. It was…well, it was a gift. I’ve not treated it as well as it deserved.”

Silver said nothing to this snippet of information which Flint offered up, but replied simply, “Neatsfoot oil.”

“Beg pardon?” said Flint, his brow knitting in confusion.

“What you need is neatsfoot oil. I think we have some in the stores. Washing it with saddle soap first would be better, but if you’re keen to do something about it soon then neatsfoot oil would help,” Silver said, making his way around the desk and lifting one end of the belt to peer at it closely. “The oil might darken it some, but it’s already fairly close to black, so it shouldn’t matter.” He ran his thumb over the leather and hummed as he considered it, before he continued, “A careful wash and some beeswax might be worth a try first though, if this was a gift you want to be careful with. Leather is porous; it’ll drink the oil up, and it might not do it good in the long run.”

Flint watched him curiously as he stroked the leather between his fingers and his thumb, seeming to be carefully considering its condition. “How on earth do you know all that?” he asked.

“My father was a tanner,” Silver said, letting go of the belt and leaning back against the desk to face Flint.

“Really?” Flint replied.

Silver nodded, looking out of the wide cabin windows beyond Flint’s shoulder. The sun was getting low and the horizon was a riot of colour; the clouds warm pinks and oranges, the blue sky turned purple and teal. The soft quality of the light made the cabin feel warm, the dark wood of the furniture glowing a burnt orange where the sun’s rays fell on it. It had a rather similar effect on Silver’s smooth tanned skin and dark hair, Flint noticed, though he thought it best not to dwell too long on that thought.

“Where did he come from?” he asked, deciding to indulge his curiosity, seeing as Silver appeared to be in a sharing mood.

“Liverpool,” Silver answered. He was still looking out of the window, his arms crossed over his chest.

Flint hummed in surprise. “Is that where you came from?” he asked.

Silver smiled, finally looking away from the glorious sunset and meeting Flint’s eyes again. “No,” was all he said in reply.

Flint narrowed his eyes; something in Silver’s bearing made him suspicious. He opened his mouth to question him further, but Silver cut him off.

“I’d better head back to the galley. It’s getting late; the men will be growing restless for their food,” he said, and he pushed off the desk and walked back to the door. “I’ll find you that oil later on,” he added over his shoulder, before he closed the door behind him and left Flint to his musings.

 

***

 

“Where did you learn Spanish?”

Flint threw his coat across the back of his chair, settling into it and levelling his gaze on Silver, who was sitting in the chair opposite him with a book in his hand. Clearly he had been riffling through Flint’s bookshelf while he awaited his arrival in the cabin, and the volume he had chosen was one Flint had acquired from the Spanish Man O’ War. He had been aware for some time that Silver spoke the language, but it had never before occurred to him to ask how.

“From my mother,” Silver said.

“You had a Spanish mother?” Flint asked.

“Mm,” Silver replied, turning the page and clearly only half listening to what Flint was saying.

“How does a Spanish woman end up married to a tanner from Liverpool?” Flint said. He could have sworn that Silver’s ears pricked up as he said it, and he tilted his head curiously waiting for a reply.

“Both of my parents were Spanish,” Silver said. “They owned a tavern.”

Flint frowned. “What happened to the tanning?” he said.

“What tanning?” Silver replied innocently, a smile creeping onto his face as he turned another page and continued to avoid looking at Flint.

“You said-,” Flint began, but Silver spoke again, cutting across him and finally looking up.

“I say a lot of things.” There was amusement in his eyes, but also something that looked like contrition. “It’s a terrible habit, lying, but really quite a difficult one to break,” he said.

Flint pursed his lips, looking Silver up and down. “So, Spanish tavern owners then?” he said, stroking his beard.

“Perhaps,” Silver replied, and he turned back to his book.

 

***

 

It became something of a game. Flint sometimes pressed Silver for stories, and sometimes Silver offered them up freely, but they were always shared in good humour and Silver never asked for stories from Flint in return, knowing that the exchange would be unfair. Occasionally, when a dark mood struck Flint and he withdrew from the crew, Silver would seek him out and begin spinning a tale unprompted, of a parent, a grandparent, a cousin, or long lost forebears. Rarely did he tell tales which he purported to be about himself, which was a detail that had not escaped Flint’s notice, but quite what to make of it he did not know.

On one such occasion, Flint had ensconced himself in the corner of his cabin, next to an open window through which a cool breeze drifted, his head resting against the wooden frame. He had been looking through his books, searching for a passage which he had once known by heart but found he could no longer accurately call to mind, when he had come across a short handwritten note from Miranda next to a paragraph which she had marked out for him. It was not a heavy-handed declaration of love, nor something carefully crafted and poetic; it was a simple note, a spare thought about something she knew would interest him, and somehow that was far more painful.

It seemed as though Silver had some innate sense of when these moods descended on him, as from nowhere he appeared at the door, taking in Flint’s position by the window and moving into the room to retrieve a bottle from a drawer in the desk without asking permission. Pulling a chair close, he sat with a sigh, stretching his false leg out in front of him, and uncorking the bottle.

“My grandfather,” he began, without preamble, “was one of the men who created the first firebreaks to try to stop the advance of the Great Fire of London.”

Flint snorted softly, placing the book he still held to one side and reaching out to take the bottle. “Indeed. Is this the cooper from Birmingham or the shipwright from Belfast? Or perhaps one of the Spaniards?” he said.

Silver smiled, perhaps more relieved than he would admit that Flint was not so lost to his black mood that he would resist taking the bait. “No, this was the watchman from Islington,” he said, taking the bottle back from Flint. “He raised the alarm and then, armed with nothing more than a firehook, a wet cloth about his face, and the zeal of his love for his city, he spent three full days fighting the flames, with barely an hour’s rest, until the fire was out and his fellow Londoners were safe once more.”

“Most courageous,” Flint said.

Silver nodded, raising his eyebrows. “Mm. He was quite an extraordinary man,” he said. “He would sit for hours in front of his hearth in his old age, while I sat on his knee, weaving stories from nothing like magic. I was entranced by the power of his words. I remember once he said to me, _‘John, my lad, the world is built on stories, and storytellers are its architects. What’s true isn’t what’s important; what matters is what the storytellers want you to believe, seeing the truth of that, and judging whether they’re right to want it to be so’_.”

Flint was nodding his head slowly, taking in Silver’s words. “Tell me something about you,” he said suddenly.

Silver paused with the bottle raised to his lips and, taking a drink, he lowered it slowly, considering how to proceed.

“What sort of something?” he said finally.

“A truth,” Flint replied, locking eyes with him. “Even if you think the truth isn’t what matters,” he added.

“A truth,” Silver repeated quietly. “Alright. When I was five I almost drowned. I lived near a river and one day I was playing on the bank with another boy. It had been raining the night before and the water was swollen and fast moving, and the grass was wet, and I lost my footing and fell in. Luckily, we were close to the weir and I managed to hold onto it while the other boy found a long stick for me to grab onto so that he could pull me out. I was very fortunate that he was there. I never did tell my mother what happened; she was of a nervous disposition and knowing would have done her no favours. Besides, I was alright, if a little shaken. It took quite a long time before I got over my fear of the water after that though.” He swilled the rum around the bottle in his hand, before passing it over to Flint.

“Is that the truth?” Flint asked, studying his face intently.

Silver smiled again, something melancholy around the edges of it, but he gave no answer.

 

***

 

“Tell me a story.”

Silver turned to Flint and raised an eyebrow. “A story? What sort of story?”

They had been overseeing the repairs of the barricades on the beach and, once the work was done, they had settled next to one another in a shady patch near the treeline. Flint lay back against the tree, running his fingers through the cool sand at his side and looking out to the place where the sea met the sky on the horizon. He shrugged his shoulders.

“Something about a long lost relative who ran away to sea,” he said.

Silver laughed, bending his good leg to rest his elbow on his knee, his fingers fiddling with his rings. “What are you implying, Captain? Are you suggesting that my stories can simply be made to order? That they’re not based on truths?” he said.

Flint snorted inelegantly. “I’m suggesting that your stories are anything but true.”

Silver slid a ring off one of his fingers, twisting it round and round, before sliding it onto a finger on his other hand. “Captain, you wound me,” he said. “Oh ye of little faith. All of my stories are true, somehow, in some way. I can tailor them to fit any purpose, but there’s always some grain of truth at the centre of them.”

Flint turned his head to look at him, amused. “There’s some truth to your…how many is it now, seven grandfathers?” he said.

Silver smiled widely. “There is. And you’re exaggerating; I’m only up to five grandfathers so far. However, I could not bear to disappoint you. It just so happens that I did indeed have a second cousin who disgraced the family name and ran away to sea.”

Flint laughed, turning away to look back at the horizon. Plucking a long, wiry strand of beachgrass from beside him, he wound it round his fingers as he waited for Silver to go on with his tale.

Clearing his throat, Silver said, “My cousin was a tall man with red hair, from what I remember of him; he was some years older than me. An obstinate sort of fellow, with an unfortunate bent towards criminal tendencies. James was his name, though he was better known as Tricky Jim-,”

“He was not!” Flint said, cutting across him.

“Don’t interrupt, James, it’s really quite rude,” Silver said. “As I was saying, poor old Tricky Jim had an innately damaged moral compass and he was forever getting himself into trouble with his neighbours and with the law. On one such occasion, Jim got it into his head that he was so in love with the village pastor’s daughter that he could not go on living without obtaining her hand in marriage, despite the fact that she was happily promised to another. He was besotted with her. Every Sunday he would sit in the church, the words of the sermon falling on deaf ears as he stared at her, watching, waiting, praying that she would notice him. For months this went on, Jim leaving posies of flowers on her doorstep; anonymous and truly terrible poetry, almost illegible in Jim’s barely literate scrawlings; keepsakes stolen from the pockets of unwary travellers. And every Sunday the pastor would write into his sermons threats in the form of biblical quotes on the hellfire and damnation that awaited adulterers and those covetous of other men’s wives. Finally, after some six months of pining from afar, Jim decided to take his love a step further, but being of, shall we say, limited mental acuity, he rather lost sight of the difference between romantic perseverance and stalking. He stole a locket from the lady herself and clipped a length of his hair to place inside it, and he left it on her bedroom windowsill for her to find that evening. Well, find it she did, and upon opening it and seeing the fiery lock coiled inside it she knew immediately who her admirer must be. Unfortunately for Tricky Jim, the lovely pastor’s daughter ran immediately to tell her father and her betrothed of the identity of her would-be paramour. In his blind ardour, poor Jim had forgotten that he had no evidence that the lady loved him back. And so as the angry mob arrived on his doorstep to politely inform Jim of his mistake, he had time only to grab his hat, his coat, and four shillings and ha’penny, before he scrambled out of the back window and fled. The last we heard of old Tricky Jim, he had boarded a merchant ship at Plymouth as a lowly deckhand and sailed off into the wide world, never to darken the doorway of the pastor’s daughter again.”

Flint was smiling and shaking his head as Silver finished his story. “I’m not sure whether that was supposed to be funny or sad,” he said.

“Sad things can be funny,” Silver replied. “Sometimes the only way to deal with sadness is to find the humour in it.”

Flint hummed and looked up at Silver. “Was that the lesson I was supposed to take from that particular tale?” he asked, his mouth twisting wryly.

Silver smiled at him. “Only if you see it as a lesson worth learning,” he replied.

 

***

 

“You once told me you’d spent some years in an orphanage. Was that true?”

They were lying together on the cramped, suspended bed in Flint’s cabin, sweat cooling on their skin.

“What delightful pillow talk, James,” Silver said, watching his fingers as he trailed them lazily up Flint’s arm. “Nothing makes me weaker at the knees than talk of orphanhood.”

Flint rolled his eyes. “I’m just wondering whether anything I know about you is true,” he said.

“You’re obsessed with the idea of truth,” Silver replied, narrowing his eyes, “as though it’s somehow the be-all and end-all of understanding a person. You know plenty of truths about me; whether or not they came from the stories I’ve told you is irrelevant.”

Flint scowled, unimpressed. “That’s a truly irritating non-answer worthy of a politician,” he said.

Silver smiled, scratching his nails lightly over Flint’s warm skin. “Are you angling for a story about the orphanage?” he said. “Some tragic tale of abandoned boys, heartlessly forgotten by the world, joining forces to survive life’s cruelties?” 

Flint huffed, but he did not contradict him, and so Silver went on.

“I suppose I could tell you about little Peter Briar. He arrived at the boys’ home at the tender age of nine, having lost his whole family to a fever. We struck up a friendship, being close to the same age and both from the near the same place,” he said.

“And which place was that?” Flint asked, watching Silver’s face closely.

Silver sighed at the interruption, looking past Flint’s shoulder, exaggerating the look of deep thought that crossed his face. Flint’s lip twitched into a smile before he could stop it.

“Near Bristol,” Silver said eventually. He focussed his eyes back on the wandering path of his fingers against Flint’s skin as he continued. “Peter and I quickly became thick as thieves. The world is not kind to orphans, especially not to the penniless bastards of Mister and Miss No-one from Nowhere, and so had we not found each other we would have had nobody else. While it lasted it was good. We had each other’s backs, each other’s confidences; if one of us was ill then the other kept them fed, and the weight of the world seemed far easier to bear on two sets of shoulders than on one. We struck out into the big, frightening world together after suffering three years at the orphanage, convinced that we were almost men grown and that together we could take on anything. And for a while we succeeded, and though life was not easy there was a lightness and sense of adventure to the days that we spent together that made the hunger less gnawing and the cold less biting. As with all stories however, if they go on for long enough then they must end with a tragedy. Peter deserved a longer story, but thirteen years was all that the fates delivered him. I never knew what exactly it was that took him in the end; he was simply ill one day and dead the next. That was when I learned the true price of relying on somebody else, and it was steep. If a burden is shared for a time then it only feels the heavier when it is placed squarely back on your shoulders alone.” Silver swallowed heavily before he looked up to meet Flint’s gaze once more.

“None of your stories have ever felt quite so full of despair as that one,” Flint said quietly.

Silver smiled softly. “Apologies,” he said. “I’ll admit I don’t always know where the stories are going when I start telling them. Sometimes they run away with me.”

Flint’s eyebrows drew together as he considered what Silver had said. “Was he even real? Peter?” he asked.

Silver huffed a gentle laugh, closing his eyes. When he opened them again he said, “You still don’t understand, do you? You get so caught up in wondering what was real or not real that you don’t see that sometimes the greater truths are in the embellishments. You’ve used stories the way I have; you know this, but you don’t see it.”

“It makes it difficult to trust you, sometimes. Even now,” Flint admitted quietly.

“Why?” Silver replied. “Because you don’t know where I came from or who raised me? Do those things truly matter in the end? I told you that there was no-one in the world closer to you than I at this moment, but the reverse is also true. There is no-one closer to me than you. You know me. Beyond the past truths that don’t matter, or even the words to express how it is so, you know me. Trust that.”

Flint sighed, reaching out to tuck a strand of hair behind Silver’s ear. “Tell me another story then,” he said. “A happier one.”

Silver smiled, lying his hand flat against Flint’s chest, his thumb stroking over the soft hairs there. “Have I told you about my aunt Minerva yet?” he said. “She ran away in the dead of night with a dashing Sea Captain and her mother never left the house again with the shame of it.”

**Author's Note:**

> Google was unhelpfully contradictory on the subject of caring for leather, so apologies if you know better and that bit was total rubbish. Also, fun fact, Minnie was totally real and my grandfather's aunt. She ran away to America/Canada with a church organist/travelling salesman (there are two versions of the story in the family) and was never heard from again. Her mother was so ashamed that she practically became a recluse to avoid the scorn of her neighbours. Scandalous!


End file.
